Katy Winge was sure she had blown it. When she nervously conducted her second interview with Kroenke Sports and Entertainment in August 2017, having applied for the position of Nuggets in-arena reporter, she was staring into seven sets of eyes piercing her computer screen.

“It was intimidating, and I thought I had done terrible,” said Winge, who conducted the interview remotely during her final month of graduate school at Northwestern. “It was rapid-fire, pass it around the table, person to person. There was no time to think. You just had to respond. I am a person who takes a lot of pride in being genuine about who I am, so either they were going to like me or they weren’t.”

A little more than 18 months since that interview, one that obviously went far better than she imagined, the 26-year-old Winge is rapidly crossing new frontiers in Denver. After one season as the in-arena reporter, working as a member of game presentation staff, Winge...